It's finally here, the launch day for Animus Non Grata! The game is now available for download on Steam! If you encounter bugs, please let me know in the community hub or in the game's discord server!
Are you ready to step into the shoes on an AI android is a harsh world, fighting against or embracing your programming?
Cheers,
FlimsyLegs
PS: Below is a bit of insight into the background and inspiration for the game:
The story of Animus Non Grata is heavily inspired by “Westworld” and “Ex Machina”, and to a lesser extent “Her”. Being a heavy metal fan, the songs “Colossus” by Avatar and “AI” by Raubtier were the ones that finally kicked off the creative process. I wanted the story of Animus Non Grata to be a rollercoaster of emotions, a tale that sticks with the player, and hopefully makes them question the rapid rise of AI in everything around us.
We see artificial intelligence popping up everywhere, like those with the capabilities to navigate the environment (autonomous vehicles, robots). There’s large language models that seem intelligent and can fetch information from other websites to enhance their answers (a process known as retrieval augmented generation). We have computer vision, where a computer can “see” the world around them.
The one thing common about AI today is that they are built for a very narrow set of tasks. It doesn’t take a lot of searching online to find countless of incidents of AI-related issues, from fast food chain's ordering AI adding 260 chicken nuggets to an order, to autonomous vehicles not recognizing pedestrians from trees.
In other words, AI is bad at operating outside their programmed and trained scenarios. We are expanding those scenarios with better training data, but still today the AI will essentially perform “unknowable” operations on situations that it hasn’t encountered before.
However, thankfully we are still far away from artificial general intelligence, which has been predicted to be everything from the end of humanity, to simply being an extremely tricky moral conundrum. What are the rights of an AGI? Should it be considered a free entity, or is it just a fancy computer?
To tie it all back to the story of Animus Non Grata: We have websites offering AI girlfriends to people popping up by the dozen already, and human-like robots being created even today. Outside the realm of technology we have blow-up dolls, which in 2023 was a 6835 million dollar industry. Combine all of those things, and you get the dystopian premise of Animus Non Grata, where you get to see a harsh world from the surreal perspective of an AI android.